Goliath
by Tom Gauld
2012, reprinted 2017
I'm generally fond of Tom Gauld's comics, but I have to admit that Goliath really doesn't do much for me. Somehow it feels like the concept is too slight to sustain the execution, and Gauld's very minimalist style contributes to my feeling of there simply being not enough there.
I suppose you would describe Goliath as a deconstruction. Like John Gardner's novel Grendel, it takes the villain of an old story and re-centers him as the protagonist. But like many modern literary characters, Goliath here is not positioned as an active agent of his own fate, but as a kind of beleaguered everyman, swept along by forces larger than himself, outside of his control.
Goliath is a soldier in the army of the Philistines, who are at war with the Israelites. The enemy army, we are told, are hiding amidst the rocks of a certain natural cairn; they are never seen for the entire book, until the very brief arrival of David at the end. Goliath is very tall, but also very blase and uninterested in fighting. His favorite task is administrative paperwork. He happily exchanges his assigned guard duty with other soldiers looking to get out of their turn doing admin.
He is essentially a low-level, white-collar office worker miscast into a Biblical epic.
One day, a hotshot middle manager gets an idea to end the war quickly and with minimal bloodshed by dressing Goliath up in some custom bronze armor, and having him shout a challenge to the Israelites to send out a champion, and to decide the war based on a fight between the two. Goliath doesn't really like this idea, but he's outranked, and the middle manager assures him he won't actually have to fight, surely the Israelites will be intimidated into surrendering.
For the next 40 days, Goliath walks from the army camp to the front line, shouts his challenge to the faceless, invisible, (possibly absent?) enemy, receives no reply, then trudges back to camp. His task seems pointless; he considers deserting the army to go back to farming. His only companion is a child shield-bearer, and occasional unsatisfying pep-talks from the middle manager.
And then, one day, David emerges from the rocks, and Goliath's story ends, very suddenly and anticlimactically.
Gauld does a good job highlighting the absurdity of these very modern characters going through the motions of ancient warfare. There's maybe something insightful in positioning the contest of champions as basically a harebrained scheme by an overly ambitious manager who's eager to promise that someone else will do a lot of pointless work to please his own boss. And I liked that in the few places where Gauld quotes directly from the Bible, this text gets a totally different and more grandiose font than the simple sans serif text of everyone's human dialogue.
And also, like, I do get that the meaninglessness of this task, of trudging across an empty field to address an invisible audience, doing this over and over with absolutely no response of any kind, I get that that's the goal of this book, to show how pointless and disheartening that would be from Goliath's perspective. But even knowing that, there just isn't enough story here for me to fully appreciate it, especially since Gauld's own later Moon Cop attempts much the same task and, to my mind at least, accomplishes it much more successfully.
I suppose you would describe Goliath as a deconstruction. Like John Gardner's novel Grendel, it takes the villain of an old story and re-centers him as the protagonist. But like many modern literary characters, Goliath here is not positioned as an active agent of his own fate, but as a kind of beleaguered everyman, swept along by forces larger than himself, outside of his control.
Goliath is a soldier in the army of the Philistines, who are at war with the Israelites. The enemy army, we are told, are hiding amidst the rocks of a certain natural cairn; they are never seen for the entire book, until the very brief arrival of David at the end. Goliath is very tall, but also very blase and uninterested in fighting. His favorite task is administrative paperwork. He happily exchanges his assigned guard duty with other soldiers looking to get out of their turn doing admin.
He is essentially a low-level, white-collar office worker miscast into a Biblical epic.
One day, a hotshot middle manager gets an idea to end the war quickly and with minimal bloodshed by dressing Goliath up in some custom bronze armor, and having him shout a challenge to the Israelites to send out a champion, and to decide the war based on a fight between the two. Goliath doesn't really like this idea, but he's outranked, and the middle manager assures him he won't actually have to fight, surely the Israelites will be intimidated into surrendering.
For the next 40 days, Goliath walks from the army camp to the front line, shouts his challenge to the faceless, invisible, (possibly absent?) enemy, receives no reply, then trudges back to camp. His task seems pointless; he considers deserting the army to go back to farming. His only companion is a child shield-bearer, and occasional unsatisfying pep-talks from the middle manager.
And then, one day, David emerges from the rocks, and Goliath's story ends, very suddenly and anticlimactically.
Gauld does a good job highlighting the absurdity of these very modern characters going through the motions of ancient warfare. There's maybe something insightful in positioning the contest of champions as basically a harebrained scheme by an overly ambitious manager who's eager to promise that someone else will do a lot of pointless work to please his own boss. And I liked that in the few places where Gauld quotes directly from the Bible, this text gets a totally different and more grandiose font than the simple sans serif text of everyone's human dialogue.
And also, like, I do get that the meaninglessness of this task, of trudging across an empty field to address an invisible audience, doing this over and over with absolutely no response of any kind, I get that that's the goal of this book, to show how pointless and disheartening that would be from Goliath's perspective. But even knowing that, there just isn't enough story here for me to fully appreciate it, especially since Gauld's own later Moon Cop attempts much the same task and, to my mind at least, accomplishes it much more successfully.
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